The Morehead-Cain

In January of 1993, just a few months after she joined the faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill, Evelyne Huber gave the Morehead-Cain Foundation a compliment that remains very hard to top.

In an interview with The Daily Tar Heel, she said winning the Morehead-Cain Alumni Distinguished Professorship “confirms that I did the right thing in life.”

For more than seventeen years, Huber has continued doing the right thing — and then some.

She has risen to Chair of the Political Science Department, and served as the Director of UNC’s Institute for Latin American Studies and co-director of the Duke-UNC Program in Latin American Studies.

She has mentored scores of graduate students, taught introductory-level courses to undergraduates and amassed a CV that runs to a daunting fifteen pages. Aside from English and her native German, the Zurich-born Huber also speaks Spanish, passable French, and steadily improving Italian.

In short, she has put her Morehead-Cain professorship to remarkably productive use. She is widely regarded as one of the country’s foremost scholars on Latin America and the political economy of developing nations.

Speaking from her apartment in Italy, where she is on leave to write her fourth book since coming to UNC, Huber said the research fund that accompanies her professorship has been especially valuable.

“It allows you to buy books, travel to conferences, buy computer upgrades, buy data,” she said. “If the account is generous enough, which the Morehead-Cain account has been, you can even hire research assistants.”

Providing that kind of experience for graduate students is critical to producing the next generation of researchers, Huber noted. Even as she works in Italy, she is supervising three research assistants in Chapel Hill. “It’s great experience for them to get exposed to this kind of work,” she said.

For now, her assistants are helping Huber compile data comparing the economies of southern Europe — primarily Spain, Portugal, and Italy — to developing economies in Latin America.

“In the 1970s, Spain and Portugal looked similar in many economic, political, and social aspects to Latin America,” Huber explained. “Then they caught up with the rest of Europe.” Huber’s next book will explore how it happened and what lessons that history might hold for other economies.

Huber’s prolific work at UNC has been aided in no small measure by the extraordinary efforts of the Morehead-Cain Scholarship Fund. At the time of its inception in 1992, the Alumni Distinguished Professorship was the first $1 million endowed professorship in the history of the University.

The fundraising campaign, led by Richard Vinroot ’63, combined the donations of Morehead Alumni with a $334,000 challenge grant offered by the General Assembly. Vinroot described it as the first concerted effort by Morehead-Cain Alumni to come together as a group to make a lasting contribution to the University.

Thanks to Huber, who has held the professorship since its creation, those Alumni contributions continue to pay rich dividends. The University’s political science department is ranked among the best in the nation, which is an especially striking achievement for a public institution.

“You don’t want to be in the rankings just for the rankings’ sake,” Huber is quick to point out. “What it means is that you are able to attract and keep the best scholars and teachers. You can attract very good graduate students.”

All of which directly affects the quality of education delivered to undergraduates, a connection Huber emphasized time and again. “We are educating future teachers and researchers,” she said. “It enhances the overall quality of the University.”

For Huber, the quality of the University has a lot to do with the attitude of her students and colleagues. When asked what has kept her in Chapel Hill for so long, there is not a moment’s hesitation.

“We have a very collegial department, which is extremely important,” she said. “I know a lot of university departments where people don’t like each other. Thank God, we don’t have any of that!”

Having Morehead-Cain Scholars sprinkled into classes doesn’t hurt, either. “You can tell when students are Morehead-Cain Scholars,” Huber said. “They tend to be bright and engaged, and it’s a pleasure to have them in class.”